Ghost Recon: Future Soldier—the Real Military Tech Behind the Game

The newest game in the Tom Clancy Ghost Recon series—Ghost Recon: Future Soldier—comes out next spring, but is set two decades in the future. The game designers studied the newest weapons and weapons research at work in the real U.S. military for inspiration for arming their Special Forces soldiers of the future. Here's what you can do in Future Soldier, and how close today's real military tech is to the game's.

Ghost Recon: Future Soldier—the Real Military Tech Behind the Game

Ghost Recon: Future Soldier—the Real Military Tech Behind the Game

Next spring Ubisoft will release one of the most realistic first-person shooter video games ever. Filled with more than a dozen new military tech advancements, Ghost Recon: Future Soldier will put you in the shoes of a Special Forces soldier in a near-future scenario, minus the blisters in your boots.

To find out, we got an exclusive look at a new gameplay level that takes place in Zambia in Southern Africa. Then we spoke with Thad Sasser, a lead developer for multiplayer at Red Storm Entertainment; Roman Campos Oriola, a campaign mode lead developer at Ubisoft Paris; and Travis Getz, an authenticity coordinator at Red Storm. Finally, we bounced all the military-tech ideas in the game off a real military expert, Jean-Louis “Dutch” DeGay, Strategic Outreach, Natick Soldier RDEC, who tells us how the game stands up against what the military is really planning.

Ghost Recon: Future Soldier is a good showcase of how the military would work, and DeGay says, overall, the game looks realistic. Many of the technologies shown in the game, including the thermal vision, modular gun components and battlefield situational awareness, are in development or even already in use on the modern battleground. But this is Future Soldier, so it includes a lot of military tech that we can imagine, but not yet build.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)

In the Zambia level, the Ghosts track down a terror group that detonated a dirty bomb. A squad member releases a personal UAV into the air that you can control almost exactly like you would a four-rotor Parrot AR.Drone (in reality, users control the AR.Drone with an iPhone app). In the game, the UAV is used for surveillance and reconnaissance. And the game's drone can sprout four wheels and land on the ground—the idea, Oriola says, is that this saves battery power because it takes less energy to drive than to fly.

DeGay says this air-to-ground conversion is a little beyond what the U.S. Army's current drones can do, and that the Army usually keeps UAVs high above the battlefield in a circling pattern to conserve energy. However, he says, the Army does use "packable" bots, many of which are made by iRobot, that drive on the ground. And while not every company commander would have a drone at his or her disposal (there'd be too many in the airspace if they did), the team in the game is a Special Forces unit. So, DeGay says, it's realistic to think they could use one for a mission.

Sasser says the drones in Ghost Recon: Future Soldier are much smaller and lighter than those used today, even smaller than the RQ-16 T-Hawk or RQ-11B Raven drones. But the Pentagon is clearly thinking about small surveillance UAVs like those that appear in the game. DARPA, for instance, is sponsoring a crowd-sourcing contest asking amateur designers around the world to come up with just that. And the strategy of having wheels on board to conserve energy would make sense for such UAVs: The smaller drones would hover in place, perhaps only a few feet above the enemy. So they'd use more energy than a Predator drone and would need smart strategies to conserve it.